Greensboro Daily News
The troubles of the superintendent of a convict camp which has come to be the same for a county prison where able-bodied men under sentence are confined as distinguished from a jail, where men under suspicion are confined, impress Dr. R. M. Buie, county health officer. At the Guilford central camp he finds nine negroes afflicted with laziness and pretending it is sickness that disinclines them to hard labor as duly imposed by the court for their sins.
“What are you going to do with them?” the health officer asked a reporter. Of course it was understood between them that the reporter was not going to do anything with them; in classical language, he don’t belong to do anything. The query was rhetorical.
Superintendent is as kind as scan be, tries to make it as easy on the men as possible, but they do not appreciate his efforts. The men swear, they gamble, theyh play cards on Sunday—or at least, the last whippings out there were for infractions of rules against these inquiries.
The doctor “wasn’t willing to go on record as favoring flogging,” but he sees the problem of handling convicts become “more trying each year,” and what is a kind superintendent, who tries to make it easy on the men but is not appreciated, going to do with them?
Doctor Buie would have to stop to read a considerable library in order to find the answer to his question that would satisfy his scientific mind. What to do with convicts is the subject of a rapidly growing literature, much of it the record of official experience. But offhand, almost anybody who knows no more about the subject than we do, or than Dr. Buie does—which may be much more—would answer, first off, “stop their rations.”
If so inclined, the jailor might in addition quote Scripture to them: “If any would not work, neither should he eat.”
From the editorial page of the Polk County News, Tryon, N.C., Sept. 2, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn94058241/1926-09-02/ed-1/seq-5/
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